Human-elephant conflict is on the rise. A report prepared by the Elephant Task Force estimated that roughy 400 people in India were killed every year by around 26,000 elephants in the wild in India.
Growing human population and their encroachment of the elephant habitat has created a situation where elephants frequently end up raiding agricultural crops. This triggers retaliatory killings and in Karnataka alone, while 16 elephants were killed in 2006-7, 46 were killed in 2008-9 and 41 were killed in 2009-10. While the Karnataka Forest Department paid `4.2 crores in 2008-9 for loss to life and crops, the West Bengal state government forked out over `3 crores for ex-gratia relief.
In an attempt to reduce human-elephant conflict in Karnataka, the state government launched a “Rationalisation of Eleph-ant Corridors and Consolidation of Bound-aries Project”. The objective is to help communities living in buffer zones and help them resettle outside these danger zones.
As a first step, the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) is working to establish two corridors in the Nilgiris, which are home to 6,500 elephants. The WTI has alread secured the Kollegal Forest to Biligiri Rangaswamy temple corridor whose ownership was transferred to the state forest department. Following this success, work has been started to establish a 2,200 acre Tirunelli-Kudrakote corridor.
Both of these corridors are part of the Nilgiri Hills and contain an estimated 6,500 elephants.
The Karnataka Forest Department is keen to secure another four corridors to ensure that elephants can move freely throughout the landscape.
The WTI has dentified a total of 88 elephant corridors throughout the country that need securing. Other state governments are expected to follow suit.
The ministry of environment and forests had set up an Elephant Task Force (ETF) in 2010 whsoe primary objective is to also help set up elephant landscapes and try and reduce human-elephant conflict. Dr Sushant Chaudhary of the Wildlife Institute of India, one of the contributors to the ETF report, points out that increasing numbers of development projects and expansion of agriculture is encroaching upon the already fragmented elephant habitats.
The problem is that “the home ranges are imprinted in the mind of an elephant” and that does not change even if the forest area gets reduced Dr Chaudhary has pointed out. He has therefore suggest that since only 28 per cent of India’s elephants remain within their protected areas, their landscapes need to be conserved on a war footing as is being done in the case of the tiger.